It can be a bit lonely working on environmental issues from the "right" side of the political spectrum. Environmental academics and activists rarely have much patience (let alone sympathy) for principles that would limit the scope of government power and few conservatives or libertarians take environmental issues seriously. Some of my friends on the right seem to think that any environmental problem the market cannot magically solve must be a hoax. There's no doubt many environmental threats have been exaggerated, and the capacity of traditional regulatory institutions to address environmental concerns is often oversold, but serious environmental problems remain, and they should be addressed. Yet in the political sphere, those on the right either oppose every environmental measure with a reactionary fervor or they insist that whatever we do, we just have to make it cost a bit less. Neither is a satisfactory response. Blind opposition to the Sierra Club's agenda does not an environmental policy make. Nor is there a compelling case for always doing environmental initiatives on the cheap. Across the aisle, unfortunately, concerns for regulatory costs and limitations are viewed with equal suspicion.

As illustrated in the past three posts, much of my work explores the possibility and potential of a "pro-environment" policy agenda that is consistent with principles of limited government. This sort of approach is often characterized as "free market environmentalism" or "FME." This moniker may be a bit of a misnomer in that it emphasizes the "market" rather than the underlying set of institutions upon which markets - and sound conservation - both depend, but it certainly communicates the idea of trying to reconcile free enterprise and environmental protection through the recognition and protection of property rights in environmental resources.

This approach cuts against the grain of conventional environmental policy. Suggestions for dramatic reform of environmental laws is regularly characterized as "anti-environmental." Part of the problem is the standard fable of federal environmental regulation which recounts an overly romanticized view of the federal government's role in environmental protection. Based on this fable, many believe any effort to curtail federal regulatory authority, expand protection of property rights, or create greater state flexibility is an attack on environmental protection. But it ain't necessarily so.

According to the standard fable, post-war environmental conditions got inexorably worse until the nation's environmental consciousness awoke in the 1960s and demanded action. State and local governments were environmental laggards, according to this story, and only the federal government was capable of safeguarding ecological concerns. Events such as the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, memorialized in Time magazine with this picture, are pointed to as support for this traditional account. This fire, which helped spur passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act, is constantly cited as evidence of how bad things were before the federal government got involved.

Yet the standard fable is just that, a fable - a fictionalized account with some truth, but fiction nonetheless. Let's start with the 1969 fire. There was a fire on the Cuyahoga River in June 1969, Time magazine did run a photo of a fire on the Cuyahoga, and the story of the fire did help spur passage of the CWA. But that's about where the truth ends. The fire was actually a minor event in Cleveland, largely because river fires on the Cuyahoga had once been common, as they had been on industrialized rivers throughout the United States, throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But river fires were costly and posed serious risks to people and property, prompting local governments and private industry to act. The fire was not evidence of how bad things could get, but a reminder of how bad things had been.

Further, the June 1969 fire was far smaller and less significant than the fires of years past. Where there had been some major infernos on the Cuyahoga in years past, the 1969 fire was not among them. The fire burned for less than thirty minutes, and was out before the cameras arrived. (Here's the closest thing to a picture of that fire.) And that picture in Time magazine? It was not of the 1969 fire but of a fire from 1952. Apparently the editors of Time felt the need to dramatize their story of environmental ruin with a picture of a real fire, so they used the best picture they could find, even if it was not of the fire featured in their story. [For those interested, here is an extensive treatment of this history.]

The problems with the standard fable extend beyond the story of one river. While there were plenty of serious environmental problems in the 1960s, it's wrong to suggest everything was getting inexorably worse until the federal government got involved. Just as the problem of river fires had gotten better, not worse, prior to the 1969 Cuyahoga river, many environmental indicators were improving before the enactment of the major federal environmental laws. According the Environmental Protection Agency's first national water quality inventory in 1972, levels of some key pollutants had been declining significantly in the decade prior to enactment of the CWA. Ambient concentrations of some air pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, had declined substantially before enactment of the federal Clean Air Act. Wetland loss rates plummeted before the extension of federal regulatory protection. And so on. Not every trend was positive, to be sure, but many were. In particular, those environmental concerns that were most obvious, understandable, and costly were improving -- largely due to a combination of state, local and private efforts - whereas emerging or less-well understood problems were not. In some cases federal regulation augmented and enhanced these preexisting efforts, but in other areas it imposed redundant or excessive controls that crowded out more locally tailored efforts. (For more on these points, see here and here.)

None of this means that all federal environmental regulation was unnecessary or unwise. There are some environmental problems that state and local governments are unwilling or unable to address on their own. But, contrary to the standard fable, federal environmental regulation was not always necessary or an improvement over the available alternatives. Among other things it had the effect of dampening innovation and experimentation in environmental protection, encouraging a "one-size-fits-all" approach to some environmental problems that too often becomes "one-size-fits-nobody." And if there is to be renewed experimentation and innovation in environmental policy, there needs to be a recognition that not all environmental policy decisions are best made in Washington, D.C. My own proposal for how to encourage greater environmental innovation can be found here.

In my view, greater state flexibility is a necessary, but not sufficient, for meaningful environmental reform. Environmental problems are hard, and the best solutions are not always apparent. Even where there is a broad consensus on the desirability of a particular policy approach, questions of implementation and design remain. Experimentation and innovation are necessary to discover how best to get these details right. I believe that greater reliance on property rights and market institutions will lead to more effective and equitable environmental protection, but until such approaches are tried, the claim is speculative. Only by trying new approaches can we learn which measures best succeed, or fail. I believe property-based approaches will emerge as the best (or least bad) approach to many environmental problems, but we will not know for sure until we try. And unless one is truly satisfied with current approaches to environmental protection (and few are), there is no reason not to let the experiments begin.

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The special counsel indicted the Russian nationals and three Russian entities for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

On Friday, February 16, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein announced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, had indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges that including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. This is the full text of that indictment.

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

Outrage mobs are chipping away at democracy, one meaningless debate at a time.

The mob was unusually vociferous, even for Twitter. After the California-born ice skater Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics, the New York Times writer Bari Weiss commented “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

What followed that innocuous tweet was one of the sillier, manufactured controversies I have ever seen on Twitter. Twitter’s socially conscious denizens probably only realized they should be outraged at Weiss after they saw other people being outraged, as is so often the case. Outside of Twitter, some of Weiss’s Times colleagues were also offended by the tweet—and even hurt by it. The critics’objection was that Nagasu isn’t herself an immigrant, but rather the child of immigrants, and so calling her one was an example of “perpetual othering.”

Tech analysts are prone to predicting utopia or dystopia. They’re worse at imagining the side effects of a firm's success.

The U.S economy is in the midst of a wrenching technological transformation that is fundamentally changing the way people sleep, work, eat, shop, love, read, and interact.

At least, that’s one interpretation.

A second story of this age of technological transformation says that it’s mostly a facade—that the last 30 years have been a productivity bust and little has changed in everyday life, aside from the way everyone reads and watches videos. People wanted flying cars and got Netflix binges instead.

Let’s call these the Disrupt Story and the Dud Story of technology. When a new company, app, or platform emerges, it’s common for analysts to divide into camps—Disrupt vs. Dud—with some yelping that the new thing will change everything and others yawning with the expectation that traditionalism will win out.

The Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig discusses how Aaron Swartz's death shaped his own life's work.

Before he started working with Aaron Swartz, the Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig built his professional life around internet law and copyright policy. In the early 2000s, Lessig was at the top of his academic field, then working at Stanford. As an undergraduate student, Swartz, who had met Lessig at a computer conference when he was just 14, convinced the professor to radically change his career path.

The two developed a mentorship and partnership that would lead them to take on the complex goals of making information more accessible and demanding greater transparency from political institutions. Swartz became known for his involvement in Creative Commons and Reddit, and for his alleged attempt to make information from the academic-research site JSTOR free for public viewing. And then, in January of 2013, Swartz committed suicide. Lessig is still reeling from the loss.

The clear goal of the special counsel is to speak to the American public about the seriousness of Russian interference.

With yet another blockbuster indictment (why is it always on a Friday afternoon?), Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, once again, upended Washington. And this time, it is possible that his efforts may have a wider effect outside the Beltway.

For those following the matter, there has been little doubt that Russian citizens attempted to interfere with the American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies publicized that conclusion more than a year ago in a report issued in January 2017, and it has stood by the analysis whenever it has been questioned. But some in the country have doubted the assertion—asking for evidence of interference that was not forthcoming.

Now the evidence has been laid out in painful detail by the special counsel. If any significant fraction of what is alleged in the latest indictment is true (and we should, of course, remind ourselves that an indictment is just an allegation—not proof), then this tale is a stunning condemnation of Russian activity. A Russian organization with hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars is said to have systematically engaged in an effort (code named “Project Lakhta”) to undermine the integrity of the election and, perhaps more importantly, to have attempted to influence the election to benefit then-candidate Donald Trump. Among the allegations, the Russians:

The director Ryan Coogler's addition to the Marvel pantheon is a superb genre film—and quite a bit more.

Note: Although this review avoids plot spoilers, it does discuss the thematic elements of the film at some length.

After an animated introduction to the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda, Black Panther opens in Oakland in 1992. This may seem an odd choice, but it is in fact quite apt. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, got his start in the city, having been born there in 1986. His filmmaking career has its roots there, too, as it was the setting for his debut feature, Fruitvale Station.

A bunch of schoolboys (a fictionalized young Coogler perhaps among them) play pickup hoops on a court with a milk-crate basket. But in the tall apartment building above them two black radicals are plotting a robbery. There’s a knock on the door and one of the men looks through the peephole: “Two Grace Jones–lookin’ chicks—with spears!” I won’t recount the rest of the scene, except to note that the commingling of two very different iterations of the term “Black Panther”—the comic-book hero and the revolutionary organization, ironically established just months apart in 1966—is in no way accidental, and it will inform everything that follows.

Like it or not, the middle class became global citizens through consumerism—and they did so at the mall.

“Okay, we’ll see you in two-and-a-half hours,” the clerk tells me, taking the iPhone from my hand. I’m at the Apple Store, availing myself of a cheap smartphone battery replacement, an offer the company made after taking heat for deliberately slowing down devices. A test run by a young woman typing at a feverish, unnatural pace on an iPad confirms that mine desperately needed the swap. As she typed, I panicked. What will I do in the mall for so long, and without a phone? How far the mall has fallen that I rack my brain for something to do here.

The Apple Store captures everything I don’t like about today’s mall. A trip here is never easy—the place is packed and chaotic, even on weekdays. It runs by its own private logic, cashier and help desks replaced by roving youths in seasonally changing, colored T-shirts holding iPads, directing traffic.

The company’s unusual offer—to give employees up to $5,000 for leaving—may actually be a way to get them to stay longer.

On Monday, Amazon reportedly began a series of rare layoffs at its headquarters in Seattle, cutting several hundred corporate employees. But this week, something quite different is happening at the company’s warehouses and customer-service centers across the country: Amazon will politely ask its “associates”—full-time and part-time hourly employees—if they’d prefer to quit. And if they do, Amazon will pay them as much as $5,000 for walking out the door.

Officially called “The Offer,” this proposition is, according to Amazon, a way to encourage unhappy employees to move on. “We believe staying somewhere you don’t want to be isn’t healthy for our employees or for the company,” Ashley Robinson, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote to me in an email. The amount full-time employees get offered ranges from $2,000 to $5,000, and depends on how long they have been at the company; if they take the money, they agree to never work for Amazon again. (The idea for all this originated at Zappos, the online shoe retailer that Amazon bought in 2009.)

Leggings and yoga gear are common sights at practice rinks. But in competition, gender-coded costumes still prevail.

Last weekend, one of the buzzier stories out of the Olympic ladies’ figure skating short program competition was one you might call … surprisingly surprising. The French figure skater Maé-Bérénice Méité made headlines: for the fact that she skated to a Beyoncé medley, and even more so, for the fact that she did it in pants.

More accurately, she did it in a bedazzled black unitard, but that didn’t stop news outlets and viewers on Twitter from pointing out Méité’s eye-catching, subtly subversive pants. “This French figure skater may not have won a medal, but her pants took people's choice,” raved Yahoo! News, and AOL named Méité’s bodysuit to its list of “most dazzling figure skating outfits” of these Olympic Games.